Marcenia Lyle Stone was born July 17, 1921 in St. Paul. She played on the local boys’ baseball teams despite her parents’ objections. Reportedly, they wanted their little girl to focus as much or even more on her studies as on athletics. Nonetheless, Stone excelled in several sports, but baseball was her first love. Continue Reading →

The 2012 Major League Baseball Racial and Gender Report Card (RGRC) released earlier this year gave the league an A for its racial hiring practices. “MLB has done an excellent job in continuing to increase the number of people of color in the League Office and for managers and coaches,” wrote RGRC Author Richard Lapchick, who is director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. Almost 32 percent of the MLB Central Office staff were people of color, but only 9.4 percent of the 426 employees are Black. There also has been a nine-percent decrease in the total number of people of color as general managers and a three percent decrease in managers of color since 2010. Among top management (CEOs, presidents, general managers and vice presidents), there hasn’t been a person of color as a CEO or team president of an MLB club since 2003. Continue Reading →

Jackie Robinson’s legacy and life story has been told and retold over the years, but mostly it has been focused on his historical breaking of baseball’s color line after World War II. “The thing that people don’t know about him [is] that my father was on fire for social justice from the very beginning,” said Sharon Robinson on her father during a recent visit to the Twin Cities during the RBI World Series. A prime example of this was when Jackie Robinson got court-martialed as an Army officer: “He was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas as a second lieutenant” after graduating from officer training school in 1943, explained his daughter. “When he graduated, they [the Army] didn’t want him to be an officer so they sent him to the middle of nowhere, in the Deep South and Jim Crow.”

One day while riding on a local bus into town, Robinson saw “a light-skinned Black woman, but the bus driver thought she was White,” continued Sharon. Since he knew her, Robinson sat in the “White” section — the front of the bus. Continue Reading →

The city of Sanford, Florida today is known as the place where 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed. But almost 70 years ago, the city unfortunately earned another dubious distinction: Jackie Robinson wasn’t allowed to play there. He was the only Black member of the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ AAA club, and Sanford was the parent team’s spring training site. Because Jim Crow also was intact at the time, the rookie Robinson wasn’t allowed to stay or eat anywhere his White teammates went in the town. Reportedly, “a large group of White residents” went to the mayor and demanded that Robinson immediately leave town in 1946. Continue Reading →